I, a wordsmith woman, could not believe the Word-of-the-Year chosen by Merriam-Webster. They recently announced the most popular word of the year was, are you ready for this, "-ism." Say what? I looked down my nose at the choice of a suffix as a word. sniff sniff, In my mind, I reprimanded the person who wrote the article, Lori Borgman in The Tampa Tribune, for such heresy. Then I reminded myself, Ms. Borgman was reporting the news and that word was news to me!
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If the contestant asked for a definition, here's how ism is defined in dictionary.com--
"noun
1.a distinctive doctrine, theory, system, or practice:
This is the age of isms."
Noun? You can imagine my astonishment when I saw it was defined as a legitimate noun.
Ms Borgman goes on to explain Merriam-Webster chooses the word of the year by keeping charts noting the highs and lows of a word's popularity at their website, m-w.com. The most frequently checked words for definitions were socialism, fascism, racism, feminism, communism, capitalism and terrorism.
I still disagree with the choice since, yes, there are a lot of isms in the words that are looked up, but ism is a part of a word, people.
How do you feel about the choice of ism as the word of the year? Do you agree? Can you use ism in a sentence???
This Week:
Tuesday, January 19--Delighted to host author Anna Simpson on her book blog tour for her latest release, White Light.
4 comments:
I didn't know "ism" was a word, either, JQ. What an interesting post! I love the way language changes and evolves. To be honest, I don't mind if ism has become a word. Language belongs to the people that use it, and if that's what people are saying, then why not? I love seeing how language changes. Thanks so much for sharing. I wonder what the next word of the year will be?
Hi Helena, Glad you enjoyed the post. I imagine next year the word of the year will a prefix? dis, un, pre?
I'm with you. What a stupid choice. If those were the most searched words, one of them should have been the word of the year.
Declaring ism a 'word' is an example of ridiculousism. Wait! That isn't a word? Well, it should be.
But on the brighter side, at least they didn't go with the word '-ish'.
I can see that one on the horizon.
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